Safe Surfing

Protecting Your PC

Viruses > Catching Them

Viruses can seriously damage your PC and they can hit you fast. In one experiment, an unprotected PC got hit by a virus just 8 seconds after going online.

When you've the flu the virus spreads around your body infecting various parts. Well it's the same with computer viruses. Computer viruses are sent from one computer to another. Some are more dangerous than others. They can record, corrupt and delete information and spread themselves to other computers and the entire internet. The good news is that there are things you can do to keep your PC well.

Every time you download a piece of software or open an email application you are exposing your computer to infection. With some viruses, like a Trojan Virus, it may be some time before you discover that you have it and it's causing damage. Meanwhile you could have innocently sent it to someone else. That's why you should never open email attachments unless you are sure that they are OK.

There's no such thing as complete certainty with computer viruses, so the best thing is to keep yourself well informed and do everything you can to prevent infection. The only way to absolutely find out if your computer is infected is to install anti-virus software.

If your computer is doing any of these things then it could be infected:

• Running more slowly
• Not responding or locking itself up
• Crashing and restarting every few minutes
• Restarting on its own and then not working
• Programmes and printing not working
• Disks or disk drives not working
• Strange error messages, menus and dialogue boxes appearing

Better safe than sorry, so install anti-virus software now. Useful Tools contains information on the kinds of anti-virus software you can install.